Get out of your own way to ensure EAM/CMMS success

Enterprise asset management or computerized maintenance management system (EAM/CMMS) software can have a positive financial impact on your plant's bottom line by improving uptime and reducing maintenance costs. But just because a system can improve your plant's bottom line doesn't mean that it will. There are often obstacles that must be addressed to achieve the intended asset management benefits.

Plant Services recently partnered with IFS to conduct a survey on how and why organizations implement EAM/CMMS systems, as well as common obstacles to achieving system success and/or ROI. Here are three key findings from the survey results.

Who's making the purchasing decisions? It varies.

When respondents were asked who has the decision-making power in their organization to purchase asset management software, managers and corporate executives took the top spot, unsurprisingly. But engineers and IT professionals have power to make the call at more than one in six organizations. Plant Services Editor-in-Chief Thomas Wilk notes in a report on the survey that the number of reliability engineers has doubled over the past 18-24 months at many organization, and "it is interesting to note that increase is starting to be reflected at the decision-making level."

Top billing

When asked to rate the importance of their CMMS investments against related systems and programs, survey respondents listed EAM/CMMS as a top priority alongside reliability and safety. According to Wilk: "These results suggest survey respondents consider EAM/CMMS as critical to organizational success as initiatives that traditionally impact the organization’s most critical assets, both on the machine side (reliability) and the people side (safety)."

So, what's stopping you from achieving success?

Survey respondents identified budget constraints, undefined operational benefits, and undefined financial benefits as their top three hurdles to successful implementation and use of asset management software. Wilk sees parallels in data from a previous Plant Services survey: "These data closely align with previous research conducted in 2016 by Plant Services which focused on readers’ experiences with their PdM program implementations; in the PdM study, the top three factors were identical to those listed above for EAM/CMMS implementations, with the difference that PdM budget constraints ranked behind both types of undefined benefits."

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